path: root/unseen/Book 4/Claire/1_tucson.txt

Claire was still carting around her grandmother's ashes the day the bomb went off. She was eating toast, the little silver box in her purse caught her eye just as the windows began to rattle.

The memorial service took place three weeks earlier, the first day after the rains stopped. The desert smelled of creosote, the rocks still looked wet and smooth, new.

There was a sign at the top of the crest, yellow, black writing, the usual font. Beyond it the road ducked into the wash. Four crossroads downstream, nearly a mile and half by the river, police in yellow slickers leaned against their cars, huddled under umbrellas, smoking and staring out at the black desert somewhere beyond the halo of headlights.

Claire arrived two days later. It was still raining. She watched the rivulets run down the window on the cab. An overweight woman at the precinct handed her a styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee. Claire cupped it in her hands and looked past the officer's deliberate expression, at her own reflection in the window behind him, her eyes lost in shadow, her wet black hair matted against her pale throat. She watched the drops of water come together on the glass, as they slid down, bumping into each, a drop and then another and another until they became a tiny river. Later a stream, then a real river, gathering up all that fell in its path, boulders, trunks of trees, automobiles. She shivered. 

There were papers. Claire scratched at them with a pen. The man by the exit handed her a plastic bag of soggy artifacts, a pen, a pack of gum, a wallet with an expired Diner's Club card. Claire walked out into the night. The rain still fell. 

Back at the hotel she peeled off her sopping clothing and climbed into the shower, shaking despite the hot water on her back. She began to sob and could not stop, she sat down on the floor of the tub. Unable to tell her tears from the spray of water overhead, she became aware of only her sobbing, her breath heaving unevenly.

After the water had gone cold she got out and dried off, wiped the black streaks from under her eyes. She flopped down on the bed naked, perching the ashtray on the flat expanse of her stomach. 

She opened the top drawer of the night stand and pulled out the Gideon Bible. She closed her eyes and let the pages fall open. Psalm 9. She propped herself up against the head board and began to twist a Winston between her fingers until the tobacco started to fall out, collecting in the open Bible. She slowly picked at a brown ball of hash that smelled faintly of sweaty feet. It was slow going with her nails, bitten down to the quick during nervous border crossing and fidgety soldiers with guns. Eventually she managed to extract a few tiny flecks of brown tar which fell amongst the shredded tobacco. She gently tore the page from the bible and tilted the ends to collect the tobacco and hash in the middle. Once it formed a reasonably tight cylinder she deftly twisted up the ends and lit it. 

The splatter of rain against the window sounded obscene in the silence of the room. There is a special hotel silence, a quiet not found in an ordinary house. A silence you can't quiet put your finger on, the absence of something, no ambient noise, no refrigerator humming, no quiet throb of half-burnt out light bulbs, no soft gurgles in the sink, just pure muffled quiet. Perhaps there are too many bedspreads in one room, too many abstract canvases covering the walls, too much press-board furniture in too small of a space, muting the little human sounds, the shuffling feet of tired travelers, the flick of a switch, the rustling of crisp sheets, all is lost in a hotel room.

The hash made Claire restless and hyperaware of the dripping, tick-tock splatter of the rain. She got up and walked to the window, pulling back the curtain. The perfectly grated pebble landscape of the hotel grounds below looked like a giant kitty litter box in the yellow light of the gas lamps.

The cacti were coated so thickly in the soot of biodiesel delivery trucks that even the rain could not completely wash it away. She could see the airport parking lot shrouded in a fog of rental car exhaust. At the other end of the courtyard a line of taxi cab tailpipes puffed in the rain, misting the sliding doors of the lobby. 

She smoked in the darkness, admiring the dull blue flicker of Plasmatic screens emanating from the rooms across the courtyard, fellow travelers like moths drawn in by the vibrating strobe of a blue candle warbling in the night air.


                              *               *               *


The next morning Claire set the air conditioner to high and, by the time she stepped out of the shower, the room felt a bit like her apartment in New York. Still no refrigerator hum, but at least the indoor weather suited her clothes. She sat on the bed, lit the remnants of her joint and stared at the black dress hanging in the closet. A gift from her grandmother, never worn. 

The smoke curled up to the ceiling. Claire rooted around in the mini bar until she found a tiny bottle of whiskey. Six years. A grimace as the whiskey slid down. Gamma was gone. Gone. Not coming over again, not making Angel Food Cake for her birthday. Not asking how school was. Not checking to make sure she was still in bed and hadn't snuck out again with Lisa Colbert or worse, Troy Williams. Claire smiled. And then it faded. Gone.

She pushed the thoughts out of her head, wondering instead what what he might look like. The black suit seemed inevitable. The hair a little more silver, eyes a bit blacker perhaps, wrinkled around the edges from six more years spent squinting in the desert sun. His hands a bit more like soft leather, the skin looser. She pictured him worn down, perhaps become pale from too much time indoors, his skin maybe now closer to the pale white of her own.

She went to the sink and washed the remainder of the joint down the drain. She raised her arms before the foggy mirror and watched as dark fabric fell down over her head, a slight wiggle and it swathed her body like a shadow. Her grandmother would have liked it.

Dressed and satisfied with her makeup, Claire raised the blinds and the midday sun streamed in the room. She drank a Coke and smoked a cigarette, waiting for the front desk to call a cab.

Claire didn't talk to her grandmother at all after she left for India. It wasn't until four years later, having been halfway around the world and back that she picked up the phone and called. She remembered standing in the tiny kitchen of her New York apartment, fiddling nervously with the knobs of her stove while she dialed the number with her other hand. There had been a lot of crying, a lot of silence. Her grandmother saying over and over, I forgive you, I forgive you. She could see her grandmother through the phone, her hands fidgeting with the knobs of her own, much larger, stove. Two years later Claire was woken in the middle of the night by another call.

A businessman already sitting at the bar turned to stare as Claire walked through the lobby. She pulled the sweater over her shoulders despite the heat, trying to look more demure, funereal, to hide the sanscrit on her shoulder. She settled into the back seat of the taxi and handed the address to the driver who plugged it into his tracker. 

Waiben did not answer the door. Claire was let in by a woman claiming to be her great-aunt, twice-removed, by marriage. The foyer was already crowded. Claire begged her way through, pretending to look for a bathroom. She ducked through the kitchen and went upstairs to the landing where she could see everyone below. He was there, the black suit was there. Otherwise he looked the same, perhaps a bit more silver in the hair, but remarkably unaged. Claire suddenly felt self-conscious, thinking she must surely have aged more noticeably. He did not see her at first, but then she began to stare in spite of herself, she could feel the room shrinking down to nothing, some invisible force compressing space, squeezing out the air from her lungs. She was wishing herself invisible, thinking of how to move through the crowd like one of Waiben's shadow particles, its mass visible only by watching those that gather and part around it. And then he glanced up at her. She turned and walked down the hall to the bathroom.

Claire spent most of the quiet memorial service by herself, at the back of a crowd of people in folding chairs. Waiben had decked out the garden for the occasion, unlit tea lights hung by wire from palo verde trees, ocotillo bushes bloomed red flowers from their thorny branches. Along the outside edge of the chairs landscapers had installed a series of enormous clay pots full of milkweed and native thistles with yellow and purple flowers.

Claire tried to listen to the eulogies, having declined to give her own, but she could only hear her own cruel, teenage voice echoing in her head, all the words that you can never, no matter how many phone calls, really retract. The words might not have lived on with the people you spoke them to, who knew already that you did not mean them, but they never left you, you had to keep chewing them over and over again. A potent mixture of cringing embarrassment and self-loathing washed over her as she listened to her grandmother's friends speaking softly through their tears. By the time Waiben got up to talk Claire could no longer hold her head up, nor did she feel much like eye contact with anyone, let alone him. She pretended to watched a Canyon Wren flitting around a particularly rotund barrel cactus, bouncing from the plump yellow flowers to the sandy ground and back, chasing some invisible thing. Its watery black eyes paused from time to time to take in the people, the dry salt trails of cheeks, the rustle of black chiffon, the creak of bones. She could feel the evening cool descending, a tuft of wind ruffled the wren and in a brown streak it disappeared into the sky only to return again after the service, as Claire stood as a parade of faces passed by in single file, the cool, wrinkled skin of her grandmother's friends clasping her hands and murmuring condolences before fading back into the house and out to their cars, the bird still hopping back and forth, undecided, chasing some phantom insect forever beyond its hooked beak.

Claire stayed out on the patio long after the last mourner was gone. She walked through the cactus garden, noticing a few new additions, a few missing. It was becoming hard to tell where the garden ended and the desert began. Claire had the passing thought that perhaps, with enough momentum behind her, she might run straight off the ridge Waiben's house rested on, across the patio and the stone wall that marked the beginning of the garden, perhaps catching a favorable updraft and darting out over the desert like the vanished wren.

She could hear his voice drifting out the sliding glass door before she was back up on the patio. Waiben was talking to the lawyer that had tried twice, unsuccessfully, to corner Claire and get her to agree to a time and place for all the necessary paperwork, as he put it. She heard Waiben say, we'll just take care of it all right now, and breathed a sigh of relief. There would be no ceremonious meeting, no reunion as Claire had been picturing in her walk through the garden, as she had been dreading ever since that first night, when she had stopped crying and realized that she was going to have to see him again. Claire slipped quietly in the side door and leaned back against it, closing it softly. A robotic sweeper rushed past her feet, swallowing up the trail of dust and sand the visitors left behind. 

She could hear Waiben and the lawyer walking around, presumably looking for her. The clatter of footsteps on the clay tiles echoed through the house. Finally Claire heard the clinking of ice cubes being dropped in glasses, and, steeling herself, she walked around the corner and ran headlong into the lawyer sending his drink down the front of his suit and his glass hurling through the air.

After the lawyer changed shirts and Claire managed to get the excess of blood out of her cheeks, Waiben fixed up another round of tequila and then another and then another and finally the lawyer started in with house deeds, manuscript donations, bank accounts, bonds, securities, stock portfolios, charity organizations. Claire watched it blur by, signatures, papers in handsome faux leather folders, keys, business card, handshake and he was gone.

She was outside before the front door closed. She sat on the edge of the patio and lit a cigarette. Distant thunderheads were forming over the Rincon mountains, obscuring the sunset. 

Waiben appeared beside her without a sound, her refilled glass extended in his hand. She took it. She noticed their fingers did not touch.

He gestured to the small tin box on the table, beneath the photo of her grandmother with the garland wreath draped over it. The little box of ashes. Claire flicked her cigarette ash on the concrete and watched as wind carried it out over the gravel until it was battered to nothing.

Claire picked up the little box of ashes. It was strangely heavy, not at all like the cigarette ash. She wanted to look inside, to see what she too might one day be reduced to, but she didn't want Waiben to see her. She wasn't sure if it was right to look at your grandmother's ashes. She wasn't sure at all what she was supposed to do with them. The lawyer had already made it clear that just scattering them to the wind was not, no matter how appealing it might have sounded, legal in any way shape or form. Claire was surprised, though not so much now that she'd had the time to process it, to learn that remains, even ashes, were considered a biohazard. 

Where do you think I should put these? Claire held the little tin box up suggestively, half-hoping Waiben would volunteer to keep them.

Waiben took another sip of tequila, cleared his throat, shrugged his shoulders.

Claire stared at the ice in her glass, willing it to melt. She wanted to tell him, she wanted to know what he thought. Her voice was on the verge of cracking. She spoke slowly, hoarsely. She lived here since she was sixteen... she knew not to drive in that arroyo. The police officer at the station wouldn't look me in the eye. They think she killed herself.

Waiben didn't respond.

You really think it was an accident?

I don't know Claire. Is it important?

Is it important? Fuck yes I think it's important. It's one thing to die, naturally or otherwise, it's a whole other thing to kill yourself... I just can't see gamma being able to do it, but.

Waiben sighed and tossed the watery remains of his drink on a cactus. I don't want to seem unkind Claire, but your grandmother was capable of far more than you give her credit for.

What does that mean?

It means... It doesn't mean anything. It just means that she was more than your grandmother. That she had a life before you that you know nothing about. That I know nothing about. Neither one of us knows very much about her because we both knew her. 

I know something about her. I know she hated your fucking guts.

Waiben smiled. Is that what you think? 

It's not what I think, it's what I know.

Claire, you're confusing her protectiveness of you with a dislike of me. Your grandmother did not dislike me, she disliked you being around me. Important difference.

Claire didn't respond, she had turned her back on him and was watching the night arrive over the Catalinas. She heard Waiben sigh a bit too heavily, she knew it was mainly for her benefit, and then the sound of the door opening and closing. She flicked the remainder of her cigarette into the garden and followed him inside.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to...

He waved his hand, the other reaching for the tequila.

I just. I just don't know how to this. Do we act like friends? Like we've always been friends? Like we've never been anything more? Am I supposed to not remember you naked? I am I not supposed to accidentally remember what you feel like inside of me because I remember another time you kept pouring drinks except they weren't tequila, they were cashew whiskey and then we had sex on the roof of that apartment building in Udiapur and I remember trying to think about how good it felt but mostly thinking about a rock that was digging into my hip the whole time...?

Waiben started to laugh and then seeing that Claire wasn't finding it funny yet, he checked himself. Though not before he noticed her start to smile.

Don't look at me like that. She turned her head away. I wasn't bringing up sex so you would want it, I was trying to figure out how this works.

I don't know how it works Claire. I remember things too. Out of place. Out of context... And yes those things make no sense here, your grandmother, us, this house, this.... I don't know what you want Claire....

She turned to face him again, the humor faded from her eyes. Does it matter what I want? I don't want anything.

He sighed and turned away.

What do you want?

I wanted to see you. Not like this exactly, but I guess I got what I wanted.

You always did.

Not always.

No.

Claire felt the past hanging around them, like the quiet air in an abandoned house, air that wants to move but simply can't, can't do anything but be quiet and still. I see you on the news sometimes...

A smiled passed over his face, Claire felt something in him relax. 

Good or bad?

She shrugged and tried to stall, well, hmm, a lot of people seem to think you're going to bring about the end of the world as we know it. That's impressive.

He smiled and looked down, tracing the tip of his shoe in an invisible arc across the Spanish tile. And you?

I don't think you want to end the world, but sometimes you can be awfully blind and stubborn....

Claire.

What? It's true. You never believed I would leave you. 

Because I thought you loved me.

I did. 

Then why...

Because I needed to. But that's not the point, the point is I hope you're more aware and cautious with this experiment. If you're really trying to do what they say you're trying to do then, good god, I mean, what if you're wrong?

If I'm wrong nothing happens he snapped.

Right. Claire walked over and poured herself another drink. The tequila was beginning to make its way through her body, a warmth in the belly, a slight fuzziness in the temples... 

So. 

So.

Crazy weather around here I hear...

Yes. Well. I've been in Kuchchri fulltime for nearly a year so I actually wasn't here, but I read about it. 

You're living there now?

Yes. I tried going back and forth for a while, but it... at some point it didn't make sense anymore... You'd be amazed, it looks nothing like when we were there. 

Is that good?

Hmm. Not really? I miss the beginning. 

Everyone always misses the beginning.

True. He swirled his drink and threw his head back swallowing the rest of the tequila in a single gulp. He started to pour another but then he paused. I can show you what you've been missing if you want.

What I've been missing?

In India. You must miss it sometimes?

Claire smiled. Sometimes.

She followed him up the smooth wooden stairs, down the hallway with its overlapping Moroccan rugs, dizzying patterns that still gave Claire a sense of vertigo as she walked by, into his office. It had changed. The bookshelves were gone, the books no doubt, like the artwork no longer on the walls, long since shipped off to India. There was just a couch and desk with an old wooden swivel chair. The barrenness of the room felt oppressive, like she was intruding on a past that did not want her.

Waiben went to his desk and fiddled with a laptop. Claire sat down with a creaking scrunch on the leather couch facing the windows. She put her eye to the telescope just in front of her, curious about its trajectory, downward, away from the heavens to the desert below. She was both surprised and not to find a distant neighbor's swimming pool filling the lens. 

Claire was seventeen the first time she set foot in Waiben's office. She was wearing a bathing suit and dripping water from his pool on the dark oak floors and multi-colored Indian rugs. It was a warm day, the floors dried while Claire was in the shower, rising off the chlorine. She had only recently dropped out of high school and spent her days by the pool, worrying about why she didn't worry about the future. She was hiding the dropping out from her grandmother, though she was still going to night school, which was moderately better than spending her days staring out the windows of an asbestos-filled building at Flowing Wells High School. She had few friends to miss, just Lisa Colbert who lived down the street and few boys she had allowed to talk her into going for drives, which inevitably ended in the foothills full of awkward groping and sweaty hands. For Claire the only real problem with dropping out of high school was that there was nothing to to during the day. Until Waiben and his pool came along. She had already decided to try getting a tan. Claire was not good at sleeping and she had spent too much time staring her pale skin in the late night light of the bathroom mirror, trying to figure out where she was inside it and had decided it looked sickly, that it would be easier to understand if it were brown. 

She had started at the YMCA pool. No one accosted her, no one asked why she wasn't in school. But the old men touching themselves in the YMCA hallways soon drove her to sneak into the pool at the La Quinta resort in the foothills. At the resort no one asked why she wasn't in school because they assumed she was on vacation with her family. It worked well enough for two weeks. And then one day she was on bus, headed up to the La Quinta with a fresh supply of magazines when she saw her name on a building. Curious, she got out a few blocks later and walked back to the building, which turned out to be the University of Arizona's planetarium. She stood under the sign, staring up at her father's name and, for the first time since her parent's funeral, she began to cry. She cried most of the afternoon, sitting alone with her pale skin in the planetarium darkness. Later, as the sun was setting outside, she skipped night school and wandered through the halls of the science department, trying to imagine which office might have been her father's. She could almost see him, her cloudy eight-year-old memories rendering now with more clarity than she had ever dared to allow them. She saw him wearing a corduroy jacket, glasses sliding down his nose, a folder of papers in one hand, walking down the hallway of her childhood home lost in thought until he noticed her -- hey, Clairebear, whatcha doin? You wanna see a magic trick? -- And then he would tuck the folder of papers under his chin to free up a hand, and pull out his tattered handkerchief. With an exaggeratedly formal and awkward bow (on account of the folder full of term papers) he would wave the handkerchief about with great ceremony and then ball it up in his hand and somehow proceed to pull out all manner of stuffed animals, toys, books, household utensils, even her long lost baby tooth which he had somehow stolen back from the tooth fairy... And she could picture him here too, walking the halls, no Clairebear to interrupt him, no one clamoring for magic. He could pace endlessly, reading through a stack of papers as he went, crashing into anyone who wasn't alert enough to get out of his way, or perhaps eating one of his peanut butter and banana sandwiches, honey leaking out the side, running down his hand and dribbling on the carpet just as it did at home. She began to look for the telltale signs in the carpet under her feet. There was the occasional dark stain, a spot of black on the otherwise mottled blue carpet, but nothing that made her shoes stick, no trace of honey remaining. 

She was headed for the back door when she spied a light on at the end of a dead end hall. She tiptoed down to the doorway and peered through the crack in the door to see a man about her father's age bent over an ancient laptop computer, pecking at the keyboard in a way that bore no resemblance to anything a normal person would have regarded as typing, but seemed, from the steady stream of green type on the screen, to be producing words. Claire slowly stepped back and was preparing to tiptoe down the hall when his voice boomed through the door, if you want to spy on me, you'll have to do better than that. Show yourself. The figure spun around in its swivel chair and regarded the darkness of the hallway.

Claire crept back around the corner and pushed open the door. She was midway through a hurried apology when she heard her name and looked up from the floor to find a very flustered Dr. Waiben shocked, mouth agape, Claire? He repeated.

How do you know my name?

I, um, Good god it's you... Here, here, he leaped up, kicked a stack of papers and a filing box to the floor revealing a desk. Sit. Sit. She sat. He sat. So, you really are...

Do I know you?

Know me, uh, no, no you do not.

Then how do you know me? 

I knew your father...

You worked with him?

Ha. Work, er, Waiben was fidgety and awkward, work, well, yes, we did um, work together. We looked for thing... we made things... he was my friend...

I don't remember you...

Oh, you wouldn't Claire, you were just a uh, you were just a girl... I never, I don't get out much...

Claire's instinct was to bolt out of the room, the conversation was simply too weird to bear, but slowly Waiben began to calm down and compose himself. Eventually he launched into a series of stories about her father. 

Claire listened, some of the stories even sounded familiar, she reasoned she had probably overheard her father's versions. Waiben went on and began to talk about projects, physics and other things Claire did not care to follow. She started glancing around the office, more of a cave really. A cave in which some crazed bear had decided to store all the remaining paper in the world. Behind Waiben's head, rising out of the sea of papers on a set of strange, waxy black shelves was a stuffed lemur, its bright, but very dead eyes staring at Claire. Beside it were various other slightly grotesque zoological ephemera, reptiles in formaldehyde, a coiled rattlesnake, a horned lizard with its forelegs pressed against the jar, a scaly gila monster, its beaded orange and brown faded by the glare of afternoon sun, a stuffed Toucan decaying on a broken palo verde branch, its gnarled scaly feet now held in place by wrapped metal wire. Higher up on the shelves there were fossilized trilobites propped on plastic stands and the ghost image of a fern embedded in shale. She shuddered at the sight of a blind newt sitting on the top shelf its head poked over the shelf, the regressive eye sockets covered by a fine milky fold of proto skin that did nothing to stop it from staring down at her, blind but knowing.

Waiben seemed entirely unsurprised when Claire hesitantly told him that she had dropped out of school. He merely nodded, as if this was to be expected and asked what she did instead. When she mentioned she was wandering Tucson's pools by day, he insisted she come up to his house and use his. It just sits there all day, doing nothing, a total waste of university money, he smiled. They pay for the thing, it's a beautiful house, supposed to be for the president, but he already had an even more beautiful house, so I got this one. Claire just smiled and tried to pretend she did not notice Waiben's frequent glances at her legs, the milky white skin swinging back and forth as her feet dangled off the desk. She tried to tuck them under in the shadows of the desk, willed them to turn brown at least. She did not mind Waiben's glances so much as she minded her knobby white legs.

It was a week before she decided she didn't care if Waiben was going to try to seduce her, she needed a private pool. She didn't call, but Waiben seemed entirely unfazed by her appearance at the front door. And the pool was, as advertised, quite nice, complete with a rock waterfall that fed in cool water, several floating chairs and a smaller jacuzzi off to the side. She decamped for the day. Waiben left for work not long after she arrived. There was no seducing, at least not on his part. Claire more or less had her very own, very large house with a swimming pool, cactus gardens, not to mention the robots and gadgetry that wouldn't be in the average home for another two years. She changed into her bathing suit and headed out to the pool with a Coke, a box of Twizzlers and a handful of magazines. 

Waiben was still setting up the link to the collider. Claire pressed her eye to the telescope and swept the lens up from the pool to the side of the mountain where dozens of new tract housing projects dotted the hillside. She saw an endless sea of scalloped terra cotta tiles and glowing blue windows of I2 monitors. She wasn't accustomed to seeing so much electricity being used so openly. The rolling blackouts in New York meant nighttime jaunts through I2 were a thing of the past. But here, in the desert, with solar arrays covering half the land between here and the border in Yuma, electricity was still everywhere. I2 glowed in nearly every living room window she could see, the cool blue light flickering as people roamed the streets of the digital world. 

Waiben was mumbling at the screen. Sorry, I'm having some trouble locating Kali, something about the proxies.

Kali?

My primary AIdaemon, kalis-23.in.amalthea.net.

You're accessing an AIdaemon from here? 

Well, that's what the proxy bit is about, send the signal into an anonymizer, come out, connect to Kali and no one's the wiser. Except that it takes a while to set up. 

You don't worry about the possible consequences?

Waiben shrugged. I'm an Indian national now and pretty high profile. They aren't going to disappear me. At worst I'll get deported and won't have to wait in the security lines in departure. Waiben glanced up from his screens and smiled. The computer beeped at him. I found it. Claire pushed the telescope away. 

A strange synthetic voice said, identify, please.

Sorry. Hang on. Waiben put his thumb on the print reader and then the voice intoned, welcome Dr. Waiben, and who is your guest.

This is Claire, she's approved. 

Noting that in the logs.

Strike it from the logs Kali. He turned to Claire, I don't feel like telling the whole story when I get back. 

Very well, log deleted. What can I do for you?

Watch this. Waiben smiled. He picked up a remote and pressed a button. The window in front of Claire went black and then flickered as it filled up with tiny white lines of code. The code flashed by in unreadably fast blasts and then an image of the Indian desert filled the window. Waiben walked over and sat down beside her, careful to leave a significant portion of the middle cushion between them.

Kali, zoom and center please. Waiben's voice was unnaturally high pitched and he was over-enunciating the words, but Kali did not hesitate, zooming the camera down toward an enormous clearing. It was just after dawn in India, the sun streaked long soft shadows westward from very building and hill. Claire watched the shadows shorten, a perfectly discernable process when on was as near to the equator as the ten square miles on the the screen was. She had once walked over this desert, populated with small sand dunes, prickly pear with bright pink fruit, curious hard black beetles that had once crawled all over her skin while she slept on the sand, half wrapped in blankets. 

Waiben asked Kali to zoom again and it did, training its sights on a large shimmering building made almost entirely of glass. It looked alien, like some spacecraft had landed there in the middle of the desert, so out of place amidst the mud and stone houses that dotted the desert around it. 

It looks like the World's Fair came to town.

Waiben smiled. It did. In a way. A bit more like gold rush I think. Or what I imagine a gold rush would be like. He shook his head and seemed lost in thought for a moment. Claire watched the creases at the edges of his eyes furrow and unfurrow and then the eyes brightened. You really should have stayed. Sometimes in the evenings when I'm stuck or just need to get outside for a bit I walk around the desert. Near where we used to camp. There are huge tent camps all around that area now. People coming from all over India hoping to find work. the camps are pretty squalid things, tents is an exaggeration I suppose. More like scrapyards turned into sleeping structures. And stores. Little carts selling dosas, samosas. You should have stayed for the food Claire. Ten times as many street food options as when you left. Well, no real streets I guess, but still the food. 

He paused. She smiled, but did not indulge his half-hearted attempt at what she suspected was some sort of nostalgic mental stroll, probably exactly the same thing he did when we walked around the tent cities, or scrap cities. It was a sleepy little town. She stood up and zoomed the camera. She could see the smoke of fires drifting out the scrap city out over the desert. She could picture all the Indian people, desperate for work, for something, coming like moths to a roaring camp fire, some finding what they were after, others blown right back out like ashes, drifting off into the desert.

It was a sleepy town. No one did anything they didn't have to do. That's what I liked about it. She sat back down on the couch and faced him, leaning back against the arm.

Waiben met her eyes for the first time that night. Well, it's not that any more. There are jobs now. People have money, they can buy the things they need. 

Do they really need them?

Waiben's grimaced. Really Claire, those people didn't do anything because they didn't have anything. Remember our guide that first night on dunes? He didn't know what Nikes were. He lived on ten dollars a month. Don't try to paint that as some Rousseau paradise. You were there. You know. And we've changed their lives yes, but for the better. The India Airship Company that everyone is racing to copy? That's never going to work. The only reason the India Airship Company is profitable is because we paid their operating costs for the first six months. They brought in workers when the train tracks were buried and the spring sand storms. And I've tried hard to use local construction contracts, to help the local economy. Sometimes it's hard. Indian politick is a labyrinth and I'm not allowed into. Sometimes a first cousin's brother's nephew from Bombay shows up when I thought I was getting a local foreman. Sometimes no one shows up. 

Well, as long as they haven't picked up your work ethic. Claire smiled

No. Generally speaking no. I have a few people that I consider reliable, but most of the complicated work is still done by the ex-CERN people. 

Under there? Claire gestured toward the screen, where the alien spaceship of a building sat gleaming in the morning light, but seemingly empty. It looks like no one shows up when you're not there.

Waiben looked back at the screen. Oh that. That wasn't my idea. Some Indian architect won a contest and got to design the building. Hideous modernness isn't it? And all glass in the middle of a desert. Brilliant. No one works in there. It's was too expensive to cool so we moved everything underground. The plants like it, but you can't really see them from space.

Claire tried to imagine Waiben in the subterranean world of apricot-tinged light that she had seen in the documentary films. Waiben in his office, toucan and blind newt on the shelves, him going over schematics, supervising the installation of magnets, super-cooled brass piping, copper piping. The army of engineers and workers at his beck and call, or at least she imagined they would be at his beck and call... to do do what? The goal, as Claire understood it, was to not just smash atoms as as older colliders had done, but to create universes, pulling energy out of higher dimensions by smashing together their shadows in this one. Practically speaking the plan to create a new source of energy, something beyond oil, beyond solar, something that could power half the world from a single source. It was either that or go back to airships, but so far that idea hadn't proved practical outside of India. 

Still get a lot of protestors?

Well, unfortunately some people still think that accessing other dimensions directly will somehow harm this one.

And you still don't.

No. Why would I? The math simply doesn't allow for that. We've run countless simulations and formulas to predict all sort of outcomes. That's why I'm in India. If I were here, with no AI, I'd still be crunching numbers in a supercomputer somewhere. I've run more simulations for this collider than all the simulations run for all the colliders in the past combined.

And you don't think there's any chance you're wrong? That the simulations are wrong?

Waiben put down the remote and turned toward her. She could see pain in his eyes. Claire, dear god, please don't tell me you've fallen in with protestors?

Claire smiled. No. Well, not for their reasons anyway. But what if they're right, just for the wrong reasons?

What do you mean? Christ Claire for every person over there protesting there's a different reason. You should hear some of the things I've heard. There's a whole legion of Americans there, the idiots waiting for the alien ships to pop out of some other dimension or some nonsense. They brought crystals and they meditate and hum. I certainly hope you're not planning to join them.

All I said was what if the protestors happen to be right, even if their reasoning if wrong?

That would imply that you have some other reasoning that you think is right.

No. Not really. Or nothing original anyway. I'm just not so sure you should go through with this.... She hesitated, not because I think it's going to destroy the universe, or this dimension or whatever, that's nonsense, but I am worried about what happens if you actually can access this dark world, or dimension or whatever.

What do you mean?

Who ends up controlling it? You? The Indian government? The Plasmatic corporation? What happens when ELO terrorists take over the building? What happens if the Protectorate gets a hold of your plans and builds their own? What if someone else figures out how to weaponize it? What if it turns into another arms race, everyone building their own? 

Waiben smiled. All things I've run simulations on. You really need to get out that hell hole in New York Claire, you're living in the past, AI is capable of things you haven't even dreamed of yet... 

Like what?

Waiben smiled. I can't talk about that here.

Is this place bugged?

Probably.

That's convenient isn't it?

Come to India with me Claire, I'll show you. He rested his hand on top of hers.

No. Let's not do this, please.

Waiben sighed and pulled his hand away. He turned back to the screen which, somehow, in the middle of their conversation had drifted over to include a view of the tiny house they had once called home.

Claire looked at it, tried to remember what it had felt like, but it seemed to her to have happened in another life, something she had read about in a story. She remembered Tucson. She remembered the day it became apparent that the Secession Act was going to pass. She remembered Waiben staring tensely at the TV then announcing he was not going to stick around and watch everything go to shit. She was almost twenty by then. So they had left. Decamped to India which had been courting Waiben and the collider project for several years. For a time everything was magic. A new world, the feeling that something was happening was infectious. The lived outside the chaos of the African oil wars, the breakup of the States, the creation of the Protectorate, all of it. Or almost all of it. When Russia cut off India's oil it brought the country to grinding halt. No oil meant no machinery, no electricity. The Indian government had been waiting for the Russian oil shoe to drop for some time, but it would still over a year before the grid was back up and running. In the mean time the desert sun beat down and there was no escape, not even a fan to move the hot, stagnant air of their house. Though she never blamed the heat, it was in the midst of the second summer that Claire began to sour on India, Waiben and herself. By the time she left Claire saw it as just another desert, slightly different plants, camels instead of horses, the mountains of the Pakistani border instead of the Catalinas, but still a desert, still her in the middle of it, feeling lost, like a spectator of her own life, merely watching what she was doing, not actually doing it.

They both stared at the screen, at the roof they had shared so many meals on. One of my engineers lives there now Waiben said absently.

Claire did not respond.

I've moved over here, Waiben stood up and touched the screen, flicking it over several houses and then asking the daemon to switch to the internal cameras. 

You record the inside?

Waiben shrugged. Contract requirement. There are perks that offset it.

Waiben zoomed around the house. Claire thought about the last day she had been in India. A day identifiable to both of them as simply that day. Every timeline must have markers, watersheds at which events seem to begin and end, even if in truth there is always another day, the day before, the day before and never-endingly the day before. Eventually you must pick one and mark it. Maybe it ended that day. Maybe it ended earlier. That day was the result of other days, other choices. Like the day Waiben stopped writing his increasingly lengthy notes on books he believed she should read, things she should research in I2 and started making excuses that kept him home in the mornings, particularly warm spring mornings, when the desert sun was not yet too hot for the pool and Claire put on her bathing suit and lay in the sun with a glass of juice or peeled an orange as she read a book. Mornings Waiben spent upstairs, in this very office, finding excuses to look out the window, telling himself he was just glancing at the desert, just scanning the skyline, just, just. That day was the result of a series of choices, the flawed belief that you could make a thousand tiny little choices without ever needing to worry about the cumulative consequences. That day was the result of all his previous days. All her previous days. All of everyone's previous days, centuries and centuries of tiny decisions from billions and billions of people leading to a single moment in time. Every single moment in time, but more so that day. And yet now, here in front of her, the very house, the very landscape, very nearly that day, and yet it felt utterly unreal, it was a picture on a window, the glass opaque and blocking whatever might lie beyond with some vision of what came before. 

They sat in silence, the gulf between them too enormous now for death or deserts to span. The sun slipped behind the mountains, its memory played out on the clouds. Claire turned away from the telescope and stood. Waiben stood up beside her, they turned to face as the last light painted a streak of cloud in softly bruised purple, a black eye across the western skyline. For the first time she saw the years between them, the sag of skin around his wrist that she had never noticed before. He reached out and embraced her, his warm body pressed against her now in a feeling of defeat, of surrender far more complete than any he had given before. The evening shrunk now to night, pulling in reserve what remained, hunkering down in canyons and valleys, a laughing wind among the cottonwoods, waiting out the night. By the time the cab reached the city, streetlights washed the sand with a warm sodium glow. Claire sat silent, her fingers tightened around the box of ashes.


                              *               *               *
                              
                              
There was no one in the lobby as Claire walked through. A monitor scrolled a news ticker and flashed video updates in silence. Opening her room she felt a reassuring rush of cold air, like climbing out the the subway on a crisp January day. She took a shower. She lay down on the bed, and rolled a hash cigarette with another page from the Bible. When it went out she pulled another cigarette from the pack and lit. And then another. And another.

She sat cross legged on the freshly made bed, the polyester of the cheap comforter scratching at her legs. The I2 was off, but Claire stared at it anyway, it was the focal point of the room after all. She stared at her reflection, sitting on the bed. She thought of Waiben's story about the mirror world. You've never heard of the mirror world? he asked as if the imaginary world were something everyone would be familiar with. They were in his office at the university, long before India, long before they began their affair. Claire had stopped by to ask him some questions about her father's book, a textbook on astrophysics, the orbit of planets, gravity wells, event horizons, worm holes. Words she had absorbed from a million places but never bothered to understand. Waiben helped her some, but he often detoured off into stories. 

The mirror world is a place just like Earth, it's a parallel earth if you will, and it isn't a mirror world because it mirrors ours, it's a mirror world because, well, you'll see. So it's like our world, but little things are different. For instance in the mirror world you might be boy, I might be a woman, and there were other things, cultural differences. There is no concept of God in the mirror world, no invisible thing out there to settle accounts, nothing that you must justify your silences to, your silences are simply your own to understand, or not. But one the of the consequences of the absence of God is the worship of mirrors. The mirror world people do not believe that mirrors are strictly reflections of themselves, rather they're glimpses of something very similar to ourselves, some other place, some other person that is like us, looks like us, reflects our movements, but not our thoughts, not our experience save for those moments when they mimic us in the mirror. So of course there are no mirrors in the daily life of these people. Mirrors are only in the temples where people go to observe their doubles, to spy on the other world. To know yourself is impossible, so many competing voices, but to know the other you is merely the perfection of imagination. Stare into the mirror and know. Whatever could possibly happen to you has already happened to the imagined you in the mirror, still a reflection, but a reflection of infinite possibilities. What is merely pleasant in this life has already become pleasure to the one inside the mirror. The priests had the most difficult job since they had the temptation to stare into the mirror all day and of course that's just what some of them did, mashing their skin at first, just to see how far the double image would go in mimicking them. And then some started to abuse themselves. Cutting skin, self-mutilation, self-flagellation. And of course the mirror image did the same and in the end some died, but then that posed an interesting problem -- did they die from their own wounds or did they die because they inflicted mortal wounds on their double?

Waiben paused to take a drink from his spiked coffee mug. 

So which was it?

Well, no one was ever able to prove either case to everyone's satisfaction. 

What happened then?

It was all hushed up the way priests and secret societies do those sorts of things, can't let that sort of quandary drift out into the public mind you know. Chaos ensues. People start showing up at the temples at all hours of the night doing god knows what in front of the mirror...

The thought of it now made her smile. She still caught herself at strange moments during the day -- waiting in line at the food bank, staring at the black glass windows, or late at night watching the street fires reflected in her apartment window -- wonder still if it was the double in the mirror that killed them or their own wounds. She knew it was silly and yet somehow she had never been able to escape it. She wondered about her grandmother's double, had it too died when the water and debris broke her body apart? Or, because there was no mirror to reflect it did she, the other grandmother, simply go on as she always had? Did she too have a Claire that abandoned her? Claire thought of the day she had finally told her grandmother she had dropped out of school. There would be no graduation, no ceremonial way to mark the passage between school girl and whatever came after. There would just be a sheet of paper neither of them would ever open, just a diploma in the mail that no one cared about. Claire sensed that she had somehow wronged the gods of passage, but it was simply the way it was. Perhaps the girl in the mirror had a graduation, some nice ceremony, some gifts, a new dress, maybe she was rich, a car, a boyfriend to kiss her late at night after the party was over and everyone had gone to bed, someone with whom she could fumble awkwardly because neither of them knew what they were doing.

For Claire everything had been marked by someone who did not fumble, or did with words, but not when it came to taking off bras, deciding what to do today, tomorrow, the next day until she realized that few of her decisions were her own, and even the ones she thought she had made were colored by someone else. She began to retrace four years of her life looking for something she was sure she had wanted and came up empty. Terrified, she realized she had to do something that was purely her, her own fumbling. It wasn't until she decided to leave him that she understood what it meant to fumble, to wonder, to be unsure. She had already followed Waiben all the way to India. That day began in the evening, she had gone into town on her own, had dinner at Trio, a rooftop restaurant overlooking the desert to the west. She could see the shabby Indian apartment they shared. She ate her tandoori and watched the sun set. It was gorgeous and yet she felt nothing inside. She started packing her bags the minute she got home. Waiben arrived before she had finished. The conversation was a kind of fumbling, quickly disintegrating through shock, the pleading, then yelling. Her yelling had been unkind, but she never thought to apologize for telling him he had hypergraphia, and ought to seek a doctor, not a collider, but a goddamn doctor that can straighten your fucking egotistical head trip out from the reality the rest of us are living in. It had shut him up at least, but then she looked up from her bag and saw the look of pain in his eyes, saw that she was not just leaving him, but abandoning him, abandoning them, abandoning the private world they had lived in for so long, just the two of them, a little battle hardened unit against the world, the unseen support on which everything depended, abandoning him in it, alone in a private world that no one else could ever enter, stuck forever or forced to likewise leave it behind. She felt herself falter. Claire felt finally that she was fumbling with her own life, knew that she could choose right now, right here, in this singular moment between two entirely different lives and for a moment she almost stayed, but she knew deep down that she had to do it or she would spend the rest of her life wondering why she hadn't. She picked up a clay statue of Ganesh, hurled it at his head, grabbed her bag and walked out the door. Until today, it was the last either had seen of the other. She could still feel the same joy, the same sense of freedom and wonder she had felt the minute she sat down in the back of the rickshaw and watched her past slip by as she went her own way.

Claire had run first to Mexico City where she found work assisting a professor at the University of Mexico. When Mexico joined UAS Claire caught a bus north to New Orleans where she lived until the first of the hurricanes came. Claire left on the first boat that would have her. It was on the boat that she met Sil, who had helped smuggle her into the Protectorate. Sil. She smiled, crushed out her cigarette. She could see herself smiling in the grayish reflection of the monitor. The room was silent. The sun was beginning to glow through the edges of the drapes. 

Claire took a deep breath and reached in her bag, pulling out her Plasmatic goggles and a small keyfob which had been handed to her by the driver that took her to the airport. She put on the goggles and logged in to the anonymous account that lived on the keyfob. She found Kali. It was hovering over a the virtual collider site, still online, but not controlled at the moment. Claire gestured to it, it came over and asked for a passkey. Claire said her name. Kali backed up and apologized, but said that it could not connect her. Claire tried again, this time using her first and last name. Kali lit up and asked what it could do for her. Claire brought up the code from the key and fed it to Kali. The daemon took off to do it's bidding, diving into the code structures of the collider, mining through algorithms and stored data from test runs and simulations, dumping it all into the data key. Claire watched as it inserted a backdoor and then wiped all traces of itself. Kali drifted away. 

When she was done Claire called the voice. 

I've got it.

How much? 

As much as I can get.

When will you be able to drop it off.

I don't know. I may stay a while. I have things to take care of.

I'll send someone to get it.

Okay. I'll be at the hotel. You have the address.

Yes.

The line went dead. Claire threw the goggles across the room and finally allowed herself to cry. 

When she was done she packed up her things and left.

									
                              *               *               *


The porch was dark. The door too loud, squealing on its old hinges as it swung shut behind her and left only the stifling black silence of the house in front of her. She smashed her shin on the organ bench and knocked over an Easter card from her uncle before she remembered their was electricity. She fumbled for the switch and turned on the light. She stood in the living room, arms hanging limp at her sides. The off-white shag carpet gave way to the couch, carved wooden legs, threadbare cushions, some sort of nature scene in oil hanging above it, a duck or perhaps a loon, Claire wasn't sure, was taking off from a marsh, woodlands in background. The house was waiting for someone. Someone not her, someone not coming home again. She had as yet been unable to spend more than an hour in it and only then by convincing herself of little lies, that her grandmother was just running late from a doctor's appointment, stopped to pick up a prescription or perhaps a take out dinner, some of her favorite chili, the smell of which, to this day, made Claire nauseous.

There had been no word from Waiben since she left his house a week ago. She assumed he had gone back to India. Claire had returned to her old haunts downtown, but the faces were different. College town, quipped the bartender at the Saguaro House, shrugging as if such things were to be expected. He had given Claire a free drink to lament the death of the Saguaro Cactus which had once grown in the middle of the room, stretching up toward the skylight. It had succumbed to the great something, turned first an unhealthy yellow and then the skeletal gray before it died. It happened not long after Claire left, some form of root rot the bartender said. A cross nearly the same height commemorated its passing.

But the house would not die. Did not live. Sat silent, a witness, harboring opinions, but never forming conclusions, preferring to wait. She let her bag fall to the floor beside the easy chair that hadn't sat anyone in the fifteen years since her grandfather died. She walked down the hall, staring straight ahead, not wanting to look at the pictures, her parents at a shrine in Kyoto, Claire in striped, knee-high socks standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, her grandfather outside a tent in Panama, wearing fatigues and looking like a soldier. She went into the den where she had left her bags and took off her dress. She pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt before retracing her careful walk back down the hallway to the kitchen where she poured scotch in the same glass she's used the last three days. Then she retreated back out to the porch and lit a cigarette. Across the street was a row of identical and otherwise unremarkable brick ranch-style houses. Those that could had long since abandoned this neighborhood. Sometime after Claire left it had shifted from middle class to lower class, finally ending up stuck somewhere between the street preachers on Prince and the free needle dispensing clinic just two blocks west. But not her grandmother. She stayed to the end. 

The cigarette burned out between her fingers and Claire still wasn't sure what to do. She hadn't known what to do ever since she left the hotel. She had made a brief stab at cleaning out the house, even called relator to see about selling it, but ended up dissolving in tears before the assistant even put her through to the actual relator. The only thing she had managed to do was drink a lot and sleep off the effects during the days.

As darkness became total the street seemed to perk up, she heard murmuring voices several doors down, dogs barked as children stepped out take up their nocturnal roles of hoodlums, petty thieves, B & E specialists. She watched as a woman stacked cord wood in an old oil drum and lit, placing a grate over the top. In Waiben's neighborhood there was plenty of electricity to be had, here only her grandmother could afford it. In the distance a bullhorn extorted the world to wake up, discover the one true god and repent from the ways of sin. Fix your eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. Claire considered this for a moment, deciding it was the most intelligent thing she had heard since leaving Waiben's house. Eventually she went back inside, grabbed her bag and set out for somewhere brighter, walking quickly to the end of the block where the subdivision gave way to the larger streets that led downtown, past Munson's Garage, the ruins of the Desert Rose mobile home park. A few blocks later, around the corner and past a few University buildings, she reached Tucson Boulevard, the heart of downtown where the smell of rotting pizza dough and steak tacos mingled with stale alcohol and the pot smoke wafting out from the behind a dumpster in an alley. People walked the sidewalks, talking, holding hands. It was so unlike the New York Claire knew, where people huddling in the darkness and moved along the streets like shadows.

Just outside the Saguaro House she finally saw a familiar face -- Gordon, a schizophrenic man with the pure white piano in the back of his pure white truck with its pure white canopy protecting it, alternated between playing a few bars and yelling at the small crowd that had gathered to listen. The fact that the only person she recognized happened to be bat shit insane was troubling. She flicked her cigarette in the gutter and went inside.

Claire was well through her second whiskey before Kill Me and The Shrimp took the stage. No one in the bar stopped talking, no one ever had for any band. She had sat through three nights of bands already this week, bands with names so forgettable even the members seemed unsure at times. 

Claire sat at the back of the Saguaro House, perched on a bar stool beneath the club's only hint of electric light, a single 40 watt bulb that dangled like a solar umbilical cord from the water-stained ceiling. The light created a halo around her which most of the crowd avoided, preferring the standing tables in the middle of the room where small clusters of humanity leaned into the candlelight to see one another, but certainly there was no interest in what was happening on stage as Kill Me and The Shrimp began to play. 

Claire was not impressed, though she was somewhat surprised to hear what sounded like jazz. Or at least something that might have been trying to be jazz. Who the hell started a jazz band anymore? It might not be good, but, Claire decided, you had to give them points for creative recycling. And there was something strangely compelling about the name -- who was Kill Me? Who were The Shrimp?

As it happened there was no Kill Me, just a bunch of The Shrimp. Most of the locals abandoned the Saguaro House halfway through the set, off to find some quieter spot more conversation conducive. Claire found herself at the bar talking to the band as they quaffed down their per diem of free beer. As far as Claire could tell, was their sole profit for the evening. Ethan was the drummer, the only one to formally introduce himself to Claire. He seemed eager to talk to her, attempting to piece together the apparently complex nature of Los Angeles bands, somehow wrapped around the idea that two can become one. There was, it seemed, a band called Kill Me Before I Die and another known as The Shrimp, named after a club misspelled The Shemp, a name taken from the lesser of the four stooges. But then through the joint miracles of sublimation and romantic emigration, the two became one, Kill Me and The Shrimp. 

How is Los Angeles?

Messy. Ethan nursed the last swallow of a Guinness, swirling it around the bottom of his glass. 

Claire was going to ask what he thought of the Protectorate colonies, but she decided against it. Instead she just watched him watch the glass. She was afraid he might come to tears if the brown liquid were to disappear entirely. She offered to buy him another. He accepted. After a while Claire noticed she had half-turned on her bar stool to face him and Ethan had done the same, elbow on the bar, hand propping his head up, cocked toward her. It certainly seemed like there was an interest between them, it caught her slightly off guard.

I grew up here, she heard herself saying. But I left years ago, things weren't really going my way... the other side of that romantic emigration thing. She smiled. But now I'm back because my grandmother died two weeks ago.

Ethan mumbled an apology and downed the rest of his beer, moving on to the second glass.

Without warning Ethan launched into a long diatribe about the Indian collider and how Kill Me and The Shrimp were planning to fly to India soon and play at the protest shows that were ramping up now that the collider was almost ready to come online. Claire said nothing, which was just as well, Ethan was full of opinions. It didn't take long for her to notice that he didn't actually understand what the collider was trying to do, he simply saw it as so many did -- marvelous, powerful and awe-inspiring. Whether that awe produced fear or excitement depended more on the person describing it than anything the collider itself might be capable of. Ethan for one seemed to think it was scary. Though he was at pains to point out that playing the protests would be a good move, music career wise, which he acknowledged was coloring his judgment. Claire kept her collider connections to herself and searched for a way to change the subject. Much to her horror she heard herself telling Ethan about her parents, pretty much a show stopper for getting someone to come home with you. She tried to lighten the story up, to make it less depressing, wishing in fact she hadn't mentioned them at all, but finding herself midway through the story before she could stop herself.

Shortly thereafter Ethan politely excused himself and went off the load up his drums.

Claire nursed the last of her whiskey and tried to decide if Ethan was really cute or if she had simply been in Tucson too long. She couldn't decide and in the end thought perhaps it didn't matter anyway. She downed the last of her drink, paid the bill and walked outside. Ethan and his band mates were leaning against their electrovan, talking to Gordon the crazy piano player who was in the process of inviting them to a desert bonfire party in the national monument just outside of town. Claire slid up next to Ethan and whispered in his ear, Gordon is batty, just so you know. Like clinical batty. Don't touch the piano, he'll flip out, germs you know... of course when he's on his meds he's a bit better, but I'm just saying...

Good to know... but do you think the party is real? 

Oh absolutely. Or at least they used to happen all the time. Peyote parties, bribe the rangers, bring a hundred people, pass the cactus and everybody gets naked. That was before the contraction though, not sure what they're like now.

Sweet, that's what we need to do, recruit new listeners.

Right. He look down at his shoes. We just did the border crossing two days ago.

Bad?

Expensive. Slow. Lots of scanning.

Claire nodded. Well, she pushed off the van with her elbows. Watch out for the vomit... and the cacti.

Claire was already walking down the street, hands thrust in her pockets when Ethan yelled, hey, wait, you want to come?

She spun around and her hair fell in her face. He wasn't ugly anyway. She considered it for a moment. Okay, sure, she smiled. 

There were already a dozen cars and trucks parked at group campsite five in the Tucson Mountains National Monument. A trail at the far end of the group camp loop led down an arroyo where, if you looked for the right clump of trees, or maybe it was a tower of stones, you could follow the remnants of a deer trail up to a large rock outcropping where indian paintings covered the mottled maroon and black rocks. 

The ocotillo spines looked like claws scratching at the cloudless sky as Claire, with The Shrimp in tow, walked toward the bonfire. In the distance the strobe effect of heat lightning blinked against the night sky. Claire kept to the edge of the fire light, seeking out the small line that led to a cooler of beer stashed under a picnic table. There were at least forty people Claire guessed, most sitting on tables, a few camp chairs dragged out for the occasion. Two lonely looking kids picked idly at guitars, and surreptitiously glanced around every so often to see if the group of girls sitting near them were paying any attention. But from what Claire could see they weren't, one girl was roasting marshmallows and then passing them to her companions who played with the soft molten sugar, enthralled by the power of hallucinogens and food science brought together. Claire didn't recognize anyone other than Gordon. It wasn't much past midnight and people were still streaming in out of the night, bobbing halos of flashlight moving through the dark desert, the occasional yelp of accidental cactus contact and general stumbling drunkenness. A girl in an emerald sequined dress, which sparkled like something out of Dante in the fire light, burned her hand on the dry ice. Someone was applying a salve and bandages. Claire gingerly slipped her hand into the cooler and grabbed the first two cylindrical objects she found, flipping one to Ethan, popping open the other for herself. They surveyed the indistinct shapes moving around the fire and watched as the other members of Kill Me and The Shrimp drifted over toward the light, introducing themselves to another cluster of girls who were already holding beer cans and looking aloof. 

Claire and Ethan instinctively moved back, away from the fire, lighting cigarettes, talking as harmlessly as they could. Eventually they found a place to sit in the soft arroyo sand, leaning back against a clump of rocks which they squirmed and wiggled against until the notches in their spines fit against the granite. They had stopped talking, there was only the quiet sucking sound of air hissing through their cigarettes, the faint crisp of burning tobacco... Claire stared at a Saguaro next to them, its silvery thorns like spiked asterisks punctuating the green ridges of smooth cactus flesh and reaching out to cover the valleys between them. Claire began to feel a waiting creep in, a tension that Ethan either didn't sense or didn't know what to do about. She nearly groaned when Ethan began to tell her something about the band, at which point she turned around, grabbed his head in her hands and pressed his lips to her own to silence him. She could taste the acrid earthiness of smoke in his mouth. The scruff on his face brushed against her skin and she thought for an instant about the Indian yogis that Waiben swore would lie on a bed of nails without feeling pain. She let him go and curled back a bit. He was smiling at her with a sort of goofy, puppy face that Claire instinctively wanted to slap, but she managed to restrain herself. Instead she just looked at him while she filled her hand with sand and let it run through her fingers. 

Then a smile broke over her face. Are you ready for the naked part?

Definitely.

Well... first there's customarily a chase... 

A what?

Claire jumped up and and scampered down the arroyo, kicking sand at him as she went.

Ethan spit and swore. She ducked behind a creosote bush and yelled at him to come find her. He stood up and walked down the arroyo looking for her. She backed up the embankment a bit and when he came into view she launched herself out wrapping her arms around him as she landed, straddled his waist with her legs. She lifted his chin up with her finger and they began to kiss. Before long his hands slipped under her shirt and she dropped her legs down to stand. His hand moved down inside her jeans while Claire fumbled with the zipper. Eventually she worked her jeans down to her ankles and pulled off her shirt. She grabbed Ethan by the shoulders and pushed him down until he was kneeling before her. Should have shaved my legs today she thought in passing, but then his breath was on her thighs. She squirmed and grabbed him by the hair, pulling hard enough that his face jerked to the side and she could see the whites of his eyes looking up at her with fear and surprise. She dropped to her knees facing him, kissing him, yanking his head to the side, her grip still tight on his hair. Her fingers fumbled at the buttons of his shirt, unable to work it out, she simply ripped it apart, biting his lip in the process. She broke away from his kiss, a faint saltiness in her mouth. She shifted awkwardly, pulling her legs out from under her, feeling the cool sand slide between her toes as she rolled backward. And then she kicked out her legs, up over his head using the crumpled jeans around her ankles to grab him by the back of the neck and force him down between her legs. She came twice before she let him up, careful to give him a few gasps of air every now and then but otherwise trying her best to smother him. Eventually she had had enough and pushed him over onto his back, she kicked her jeans off one leg and climbed on top of him, licking at the saliva on his chin. He slid inside her and she began to rock back and forth, but a scuffling in the bushes stopped her, the two guitar playing boys from the fire were crouched down, staring wide-eyed at Claire's breasts. She scowled at them, expecting them to run, but they didn't. Instead one extended a baggie, flipping it toward Claire. It landed in the sand next to her and she glanced down. Even in the moonlight she could clearly see the shriveled gray Peyote buttons. She shrugged and bent down to kiss Ethan again, her fingers digging in the sand until they curled around the plastic bag. She pried the seal apart with one hand and extracted two Peyote buttons, which she then popped in her mouth.

He came inside her and she rolled off him on her back, the cold sand pressing against her bare back. They lay side by side, staring up the stars. She smiled and reached over for the bag, pulling out two more buttons. You want to try some Peyote? She ran a finger across Ethan 's lip and stuck it gently into in his mouth, pulling his jaw open. Her other hand brought up the Peyote which she slid onto his tongue. His face screwed up surprise and he spit the Peyote out into his palm. He looked down at them, grey and slick with spit. He looked back at her. 

You're serious? Where did you get these?

She shrugged, does it matter?

This is Peyote? He lay back down and help it up against the moonlight.

Yup.

You vomit?

You do.

Did you eat some already?

Two.

What's it like?

Claire laughed and shrugged. I don't know, I've never done it.

Huh. Ethan popped the buttons back in his mouth. They were crunchy and dry despite his spit. He nearly gagged as they made their way down his throat.

How long does it take?

Claire ignored him and rolled over, reaching for her jacket. She shook out sand and pulled out a cigarette. She stood up naked in the moonlight and watched as come dripped out of her, running down her leg. Ethan stared at her white skin even whiter in the pale light. She let him stare, his eyes and then his hands tracing the curve of her calf, the bend behind her knee, up to the soft skin of her inner thighs. She reached down and cupped a hand between her legs before he could get there. He looked up at her face and Claire scooped up a gooey mass of come and flicked it at him. Don't get all serious on me. And I have no idea how long Peyote takes Ethan. Something new. I think maybe you ask a few too many questions...

He shrugged. People do say that from time to time...

I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that. She lay back down beside him staring up at the stars. They lay like that for a while, dozing at times into some light form of sleep. Claire could have sworn she was dreaming, but a dream that was no different than where she actually was...

She heard Ethan 's voice say, Should we maybe, I dunno, head back to the fire? And the thought of it snapped her to. Lord no. Claire propped herself up on her elbow and lit another cigarette. The last thing I want if I'm going down some rabbit hole is to be around other people. Let's just stay here...

You want to go again...

She smiled. What if I throw up on you, isn't that a bit forward for a first date?

...

Plus I think I got sand in me...

That's not be good.

No it's not.

They smoked in silence, waiting.

Nothing seems to be happening...

I think it takes more than ten minutes Ethan .

Maybe we should eat some more...

Claire grabbed the bag and held it up to the lighter. There were about two dozen buttons in it. He snatched it out of her hand and began digging through it. I say we eat these, Ethan held out about half the bag. 

Why not? Claire grabbed her half and popped one in her mouth, chewing it slowly. It tasted like powdered sour milk.

It looks like ginger that you left in the fridge too long...

You cook?

I used to. 

Claire lay down on her back in the soft arroyo sand. Ethan finished the cigarette and lay down beside her. After a while she heard him say, I feel... Different.

Me too. I feel happy.

She closed her eyes and let her whole body relax as she breathed out. She saw a vast field of green plants, little white flowers, as far as she could see, like a tulip garden in Holland, but much smaller flowers, or she was much bigger, a giant. She tried to say something to Ethan, but could not speak. Her mouth moved, but the words were garbled and only gurgling sounds came out. She gave up. She stood, half-stumbling at the awkwardness of her body, lurching forward involuntarily, she felt a thick warmth in her mouth. She spit but nothing seemed to come out. She coughed and felt bile in her throat. She vomited but it was not vomit, a flower, a plant, the root and soil sliding thickly across her tongue. And then another. Tiny white flowers fell. She looked down and saw the plants protruding up around her, carrots, but they were growing upside down, pointy orange tips reaching for the sky. Claire felt the pinch as they slipped into her soles, puncturing the skin, growing up inside her, up her legs, thin green stalks in her veins and suddenly she was was on the ground again, pulled down by the roots running though her, the plant covering over her, breaking out through the pores in her skin, in her mouth, choking her, she gasped but could not breath. She stopped trying, and then the warm soil came over her, the musty scent of earth. Her lungs burned but the feeling was far away, and then there was darkness.

She was floating in a pure black, vacuous emptiness, nothing below, nothing above, no up, no down. She held up her hand to her face, but she could not see it, only darkness suffocating her. She began to be afraid, but then she saw them, at the far edges of her vision, impossibly distance, a cluster of lights like nearly burnt out suns, the cool white light of neutron stars, not yet consumed in the darkness. They drew closer, though she could not tell if it was she to them, or them to her. They became more distinct, individual lights, not so much neutron stars as fireflies, darting and hovering in the night. After a while she noticed patterns in their movement. It looked as if each light were moving in a series of tubes, an endless cubical grid of invisible tubes connected by hubs like the toothpick and chickpea sculptures she had built as a child. Beads of yellow and white light moved through the grid. As she rushed toward them they broke apart into smaller lights, colored now, blues and reds and greens speeding along until she realized that she too was one of the lights, she could feel herself throb and pulse, something within her radiating out. Everything spun by in a dizzy pinwheel of color as she moved through the grid, disappearing into a hub and then feeling herself expelled back out of it again. Each time she moved out of a hub into a blackness there was an unbearable sense of loss, of total emotional emptiness that terrified her. Each time she felt as if there was no escape, that this was the emptiness that she would always exist in, would always feel. Sometimes she mutated through colors as she went, from the green throb of illness, a bout of Strep as child, her throat swollen with lumps and then through another hub and out she came pulsing blue as the ocean, her body slipping into a pool, the concrete cool and wet. Then came yellow, birds on the patio at the her grandmother's house, fighting over mottled sunflower seeds in the feeder, in and out another hub, this time red, the rage at the man at the door, her grandmother crying... and the pace began to accelerate, she felt her heart rate speed up and she became afraid, gasping and panting, the blood pounding through her so intensely she could feel her heartbeat in her belly, in her elbows, her knees and then came panic and terror, but then something was tearing at the blackness, ripping through it, scratches of white light seeping in from a above, blinding her. She looked up and saw a young doe chewing the grass that surrounded her. Claire lifted her head, the dirt and grass cascading off of her. Her arms were heavy, hard to lift out of the soil. The deer regarded her, neither curious nor surprised, it continued to chew, watching her.

She pulled herself out of the ground and stood. The deer swallowed and then motioned with its head. Claire followed as it leaped up and bounded across the field and into a dark wood where she could see nothing. They walked on until gradually the trees thinned, the undergrowth tapered and they emerged onto a city street. She walked quickly, trying to keep up with the doe as it bounded ahead, then turned to wait, watching her struggle to keep up. That went on until she began to recognize where she was -- New Orleans, her old street, up to the landing of old her house, her old bedroom, the sheets were the way she had left them, crumpled and dirty, a rusty-brown spot on one side where she had passed out drunk without a tampon in. She felt herself blush but the deer seemed not to notice. He walked across the bedroom, stepping over Claire's crumpled dresses, around the overflowing laundry basket. The deer moved gingerly, its tiny hoofs navigating around a jewelry box that had fallen off the dresser, its back legs bending awkwardly to slip over the hope chest at the end of bed until it finally made it to the peeling French doors that led out to the balcony where it stopped and stared out at downtown. Claire walked around the bed, flipping the blanket as she went to cover the stain and followed the deer's gaze until she saw it: New Orleans was on fire. Smoke billowed from the windows of the high rises, tiny figures clinging to a helicopter that struggled to lift off under the weight, rocking side to side out of control until some fingers slipped and figures plunged down toward the street below. The strange block top of the Crescent City Residences erupted as if a bomb had gone off, spewing concrete and glass from its flaming mouth. The sound hit Claire in the plexus, a high pitch scream that came well after she saw the impact. Her turned her head toward the sea where she could see warships firing huge guns that lay like spikes on their decks. There was another burst of flame as shells rocketed into the wharf area hitting a series of warehouses that began to erupt in flames. The rockets came in faster now, hitting buildings all around her, flames leapt up, the shock waves rolled through the city, shattering glass and drowning out the screams, but Claire could see people running. An old women stumbling out a doorway, half on fire, the flames leaping in her hair... a boy wandering lost, tears in his eyes, mouth open in a mute scream... She turned back to look inland at the expressway heading out of town where there was already a line of people pushing wheelbarrows full of belongings, moving as fast as they could, keeping low against the median. Families pulling toy wagons overflowing with suitcases and clothes, dogs in baskets. She closed her eyes and looked away but the deer nudged her and gestured back, out the window. She looked again and it was night, the city burned, the roar of the fires was like nothing she had ever heard, a giant sucking sound that seemed to consume all other noise, pulling everything in on itself like a collapsing star. 

The deer turned and walked out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs and into the street where he stood, Claire at his side, watching the river of humanity rise up out of New Orleans and head inland like a tide swelling, their heads hung low. They walked in silence, parting around Claire like a river encountering a rock, not noticing or not caring that she was there. The deer began to walk through them, moving upstream against a great river of human detritus, Claire in tow, stumbling over the broken asphalt, chunks of concrete uprooted from the sidewalks, crumbled bricks and shattered glass from the still smoking rubble of the houses lining Lafayette where Claire and deer walked slowly, silently among the crowd. And then the doe turned down a side street, out of the flow of humanity and wandered into a door that led up a flight of stairs, around a widow's walk and into a set of doors which revealed not another room in New Orleans, but the little brick house that would not die. She stood back in her grandmother's living room, the carefully lathed wood railing that sectioned off the kitchen, the TV still there, the artifact of an earlier age, punctuating the room like an exclamation point, front and center and silent. The deer moved forward to the mantel above the television where the box of ashes sat atop the book, just as Claire had left them. The deer knocked the ashes off the book and stepped back, its coarse fur pressed against her leg. Claire stepped around it, gathered up the ashes and took the book in her hands. The deer stepped lightly over the matted white carpet and into the kitchen, Claire followed, moving around the corner until she saw her grandmother sitting there, sipping tea at the table, smoothing a yellow napkin slowly between her fingers. The deer walked through and stood behind her. Claire sat down at the table across from her grandmother and watched as her grandmother's mouth twisted and gapped, unable to form words, but producing a bubbling spittle that dribbled down her chin and sprayed onto the table in front of her. She nodded slowly, attempting a smile and brought the napkin to her lips, dabbling up the spittle from her chin. Claire began to sob, her grandmother's hand reached out, pressed on hers, cold and bony. She began to speak again, but only produced more bubbling, as if the sounds were only half fermented and oozing out, the white bubbles popped like sea foam sliding across her chin, a great wave gurgling unseen, deep down in her throat. Her mouth gapped and gasped like fish flopping on the shore until finally her throat began to murmur soft sounds and little beads of light began to emerge, small beautiful lights that flew up out of the bubbling spittle. They hung in the air like tiny lanterns suspended on invisible strings, dancing slowly in the still air of the kitchen. Her grandmother paused to catch her breath and turned her head to watch the beads of light hovering in the air. Suddenly Claire noticed her grandmother's jaw was broken and hung down, listing to the side where saliva dribbled out onto the floor, pooling in puddles of red and white... Claire half rose and put her hand to her grandmother's face but recoiled at the cold of dead skin. Her grandmother's hand moved up and touched Claire's own face, the cold bony fingers began to work at her jaw, moving it until Claire found herself saying, I love you ... and then suddenly the lights began to dim, fell out of the air, hitting the table and bursting into sounds that hit Claire's eardrums like the blast of the train whistle, screeching and unintelligible, until they started to faded away, dropping in pitch as the went. Claire could finally make out the sound, it rushed in at her, like a speeding train running her down at the crossing, fast approaching a sinister growl that began to howl. Claire jumped back in terror, knocking over the chair and falling back against the wall, the words were coming toward her, they were on her, crawling over her skin like curious scorpions, stinging painful barbs began to pierce her, she opened her mouth to scream and they rushed in diving down her throat and she could feel them squirming in her stomach as she squirmed on the ground, clawing at the yellow linoleum of the kitchen floor, trying to pull herself toward the glass door, gasping and crying, unable to scream. The door was open and she pulled herself out, following the deer's hooves which moved across the brick patio and out into the grass and sand where Claire clawed at the earth. And then the pain in her stomach passed as suddenly as it came and she pulled herself up and stood shaking. Looking around her again she saw that they were in the middle of a dusty street, old buildings with wood walkways lined either site, the wood rotted and gray, too long in the desert sun. The wind blew, a chair on a porch rocked back and forth, tick-tocking over the wood planks like a grandfather clock. Gusts began to pick up, gather into something steady and howling. The wind smelled of the sea, twinged with salt and moisture... The air seemed to gather up around them, little electric sparks, the palpable tension that precedes the thunderclouds. But there were no clouds, no thick black and ominous warning on the horizon, only a thin gray line, like a band of smoke running horizontally across the western sky. The deer stopped and cocked its head looking up at the shape in the sky, which was clearly growing closer, clearly moving toward them. Though it resolved itself moments before it arrived, it took Claire some time to realize that the smoke was in fact birds, an enormous flock of birds... gulls and cormorants, geese, robins and crows, pinyon jays, thrushes and desert warblers, all of them moving in a singular mass that came roaring overhead, a thousand tiny beaks, screeching and screeching, protesting at the unbelievable blast of wind that accompanied their arrival, blowing them from somewhere else, forced to ride along helpless for a while, until they were deposited somewhere else by a twist of fate. Claire looked around but there was no one, the deer was gone. The birds moved through in a hurricane of beaks and talons, her skin was cut, feathers beat against her ears and then, as quickly as they, came they left, pulled on by the invisible storm. Claire was alone.

					
						  *		*		*		*


The light behind her eyelids was red. Claire opened her eyes slowly, squinting at the glare leaking in through the shutters. She felt a thread from the quilt tickle her lip, her eyes adjusted to the light and she moved her head to have a look around. Quite clearly her grandmother's house, but worse, quite clearly her grandmother's bedroom, quite clearly her grandmother's bed, the sheets Claire still hadn't washed... She sat up in alarm, extending her arm directly into Ethan's bare back. They both started. She wondered if her eyes were as saucer big and scared as his. 

Jesus. I didn't know... Sorry I ... How did we get here?

Ethan sat up next to her. Are you serious? You don't remember Gordon giving us a ride? After you told him you would spit in his face and give him tuberculous if he didn't?

I did that?

You did.

And we came here? And you stayed with me?

Well, I can't say that was the highlight of the evening, but there were other moments such that I overlooked it. At least for now. 

I'm touched. She rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. But then she froze and spun around, popping her head out the bathroom door. We didn't have sex here did we?

No. I tried, but you were pretty gone.

Thank god Claire mumbled, ducking back in the bathroom and turning on the shower. She let it get steaming hot despite the fact that it was undoubtedly already scorching outside. She stepped in and let the water hit her full in the chest, little beads running down her stomach, she relaxed until she closed her eyes and saw her grandmother again, sitting in the kitchen. She could still hear it, feel the words crawling on her skin. She opened her eyes and tried to will the vision away, but everything she thought about seemed to keep coming back around to the white foam in her grandmother's mouth. She gave up and turned off the shower.

When she stepped out of the bathroom, towel wrapped around her body, Ethan was sitting up in bed smoking a cigarette and leafing through a copy of the Bhagavad Gita that Claire had been reading.

Breakfast? She walked around the bed.

Shower?

Sure, I'll wait. Claire walked down the hall to the kitchen where she dug through the cupboards looking for the coffee. Eventually she found an old tin of Folgers, but left it where it was. She closed the cupboard and turned to face the table. She saw her grandmother, her mouth moving, gaping. Claire nearly screamed. But when she looked again it was gone.

Her heart was racing. She half ran out of the kitchen, into the den where she found her clothes from the night before. She dug through her jacket for a smoke and pulled on an old t-shirt and skirt from her backpack. She took a deep breath and walked back out in to the kitchen, closing her eyes as she stumbled awkwardly around the table and fumbled for the sliding glass door. Outside the light was like a scalpel carving the world with singular, glaring precision. Claire felt like she was stepping out of a movie theatre at midday. She smoked her cigarette and tried to think of the good things she had seen last night, but quickly concluded that there really hadn't been any. And she had threatened Gordon? She had always known there was a reason she stayed sober most of the time, she had just never known exactly what it was. She flicked the cigarette in the dead grass and went back inside. 

Eventually Ethan came out, freshly showered and looking, if not Claire's type exactly, at least attractive enough. They walked downtown until they found a diner that was still serving breakfast at the crack of noon. Along the way Ethan plied Claire with questions about the Indian collider. She quickly realized that at some point last night she had been alarmingly forthcoming with her knowledge of the collider, though, as far as she could tell from Ethan's questions, she had never mentioned Waiben. At first she answered his questions with the sort of vague physics platitudes that she had heard Waiben drop to those whom he knew didn't really want to know the answer. But then around the time they settled into a booth at the tackily named Old Time Kafe, she realized that he genuinely wanted to know, so she started in on design as best she understood it, still able see the diagrams and chicken scratch scrawl of Waiben's notes. At one point Ethan stopped her. Is this really something that I'm going to understand? He was forking his way through a Texas omelette, a browned pile of eggs saturated in Pinto beans, salsa and a now liquified pool of sour cream. 

You should, it's along the same lines as music, just with different scales and resonances...

Where's the backbeat?

That's question isn't it? It's a mystery.

I like it already. Except for the part where our existence is happening in the middle of some vibrating string. Guitar players always get all the glory.

What about Phil Collins? Claire thought for a moment that Ethan was going to leap over the table and strangle her, but the rage seemed to pass as quickly as it came and he let it slide. 

So the strings vibrate...

That's one way of looking at it. Another is that we, and everything else in this world, are shadows cast by objects in another dimension.

So which is it?

Both most likely. I always liked it better to think of it as the objects that cast the shadows we see, like the old Plato cliche about the shadows in the cave... Or think of it this way, since you're from L.A., imagine you're at a Hollywood party, the crowd is rather thick, and evenly distributed around the room, chatting. When the big star arrives, the people nearest the door gather around her. As she moves through the party, she attracts the people closest to her, and those she moves away from return to their other conversations. By gathering a fawning cluster of people around her, she's gained momentum, an indication of mass. She's harder to slow down than she would be without the crowd. Once she's stopped, it's harder to get her going again. That's mass, the crowd is the Higgs particle and it's in the process of interacting with the crowd that the starlet, or the type of particle we're used to seeing, behaves as if she has mass because of it. So the question becomes, essentially, does the intangible give rise to the tangible? Or is it the other way around? If Wai-they are right then the intangible gives rise to the tangible. And the intangible is extra-dimensional. Remember the Higgs Boson particle they found in Switzerland?

Ethan smiled. No.

Well, the theory was that an invisible particle, so small we couldn't detect it, almost a bit like the Aether of old, was what actually makes the larger particles we can see, electrons and so on, behave the way they do. They even had a name for it, the Higgs Boson particle and it, if it existed, would be the thing that bestows mass, it was to be, for lack of a better word the, god particle, because it creates everything else. So they found it, but it didn't behave quite the way they thought it would, so now they think the Higgs particle might in fact be not a particle but a whole other dimension or a dark world or... there are some other metaphors, but you get the idea...

Ethan nodded and seemed satisfied with this explanation, though Claire knew was only about half-true at best, but Claire had lost interest. She couldn't shake a worried feeling that had been dogging her ever since she had become a bead of light traveling through invisible tubes. Jesus, she thought, maybe I'm still high. She reached into her purse to check the time on her com and noticed that both the box of ashes and the book from her hallucination were inside. She was just about to freak out about the discovery when her thoughts were interrupted by a massive concussive blast that rocked the building and rattled the windows. Alarms began to go off all up and down the street. Everyone outside had stopped and was scanning the sky. The sound was like the boom of a jet, but somehow different, more rolling, like an earthquake arriving from somewhere far away, except that the ground did not roll.

Ethan looked at her. Claire shrugged. The restaurant was silent, even the cooks had stopped fussing at the flattop and were looking out the window as if waiting for another, but nothing happened. The other patrons began to whisper amongst themselves, sonic boom maybe... earthquake?

Ethan shrugged and went back to his omelette, eating in silence.

Claire pulled out her com. That's odd, my com is dead.

Ethan pulled his out to check. So is mine. Protectorate networks are shit.

Maybe. Claire got up and went to the counter and put on the open Plasmatic goggles. I2 was still working, but before she would log in she heard fighter jets coming in low over the city, well off the allowed flight path and much faster than Claire was used to, flying in pairs. The windows rattled again as the jets passed overhead, two then two more, then two more. They kept coming, a squadron's worth at least Claire thought as the goggles confirmed her retinal scans and granted her access to her I2 properties. There did not seem to be anything unusual happening in I2 at first glance, but as Claire began to walk around the room things started to disappear. First the Picasso over the sofa blinked out, replaced by the grey and white checkers of I2 canvas. Then the couch vanished, then the window and the view beyond. As Claire spun around things continue to disappear, someone was deleting her. She saw a glimmering in the corner of the room just before the walls blinked out, a shadowy wisp of a daemon and then she ripped the goggles off. 

She walked back to the table trying her best to look casual and unconcerned. We should go, she whispered.

What? Wait a minute I want more coffee. Now, Claire hissed, tossing money to the man behind the cash register and not bothering with change. She grabbed Ethan by the jacket collar and pulled him up out of the booth.

What the fuck Claire? They stood outside the restaurant as another pair of fighters roared overhead.

I need to get out of here.

Okay...

Are you coming?

Coming where?

Well, back to the house for starters.

Okay.

When they got back to the house Claire threw her clothes in her backpack, grabbed two photos off the organ and gently placed the box of ashes and the book on top. She picked up the book again, wondering if it was worth the weight. It was nearly falling apart. Claire had found it when she attempted to clean out the house several days ago. The book had a silver lock on it, Claire had been looking for a key when she found a box of pictures and memories and tears had ended that project. She picked up the book and ran her fingers over the lock. It seemed like a journal. She dropped it back in her backpack. She was about to tighten down the top straps when she heard Ethan clearing his throat. She turned around and Ethan was behind her, pointing a rather large gun at her.

What the fuck?

Claire, okay, just, don't freak out. I just. Look I was hired to find you and get something from you. And I searched all through this house last night when you were passed out and I couldn't find it. And I watched you pack and I still didn't see it. 

You did find my grandfather's gun I see.

Look. I don't want to be pointing this at you. I like you. But the man who hired me.

Is going to kill you if you don't find what he sent you to get?

Yes.

I know. He's going to kill me too. I guess he's already trying. He's kind of a dick.

Ethan smiled a bit. Yes, he is. But he pays well.

True. He does. Claire was reasonably sure he wasn't going to actually shoot her. She tried to relax. They stood staring at each other in the still heat of the room, both unsure what to say. Finally Claire broke the silence. Are you really a drummer?

This time Ethan couldn't stop himself, he smiled and looked like he might laugh, but he caught himself. I am. But I freelance. The Shrimp aren't exactly raking in the dough.

What do you want to do?

I want you to give me the datakey.

I don't have it.

He frowned. 

I mean I have it, but it's not here.

Well then let's go get it. Where is it?

I'll take you, but we need a car.

Ethan sighed. He pulled out his com and held it up for Claire to see. Still dead.

Use the old dialphone in the kitchen.

You first.

Claire walked past him, keeping her hands not exactly up, but where he could see them.

She pulled the ancient touch tone phone off the hook and tossed it to Ethan. He dialed a number. Claire fidgeted with the knobs on the stove and stared into the darkness of the pantry, wondering if she could close and lock the door fast enough to keep Ethan out. And then what? She edged toward the darkness of the pantry anyway. She heard Ethan ask someone to go ahead and swing by. Then she heard confusion in his voice. What? Fuck me. Okay.

What?

Claire, what did you do?

What?

Apparently there's a Protectorate bulliten out for you. What did you do? What the hell do they want with you? 

Nothing. Well, I mean, other than accessing an AIdaemon to get that precious data your boss wants, nothing.

Fuck. You used AI? Why would you do that?

Claire shrugged. Self-destruction runs in my family. She suddenly felt the same sense of unbelievable joy she had felt in the rickshaw leaving Waiben. She felt almost whimsical.

Fuck. Well, do you have a plan for getting out of here?

Yes.

Well, now would be good time to put it in action I think.

Oh, well, I don't have a plan for getting out of here exactly, I have a plan for getting out of jail.

What?

I know someone that can get me out of jail. She smiled brightly.

Who Waiben?

She laughed so suddenly spit flew out her mouth. No. Not Waiben.

I would think no going to jail would be a better plan.

Yes. Yes it would.

He was waving the gun around as he spoke and it began to make Claire nervous. She edged closer to the stove and began to involuntarily fiddle with the knobs.

Don't get any ideas.

What?

The stove. You're thinking you could turn on the gas and blow me up or something.

You really are stupid Ethan. Do have any idea how long it would take to file this room with enough gas to. Never mind. Besides, wouldn't that blow me up too?

He looked down and said nothing.

Throw me a cigarette. 

Ethan turn and grabbed the pack off the kitchen table and tossed it to her.

She pulled one out. Got a lighter?

He felt his pockets. No. Use the stove.

Aren't you worried it's been running all this time and when I turn it on it'll blow up?

You said...

She turned the knob. Nothing happened. The sound of hissing propane filled the room. There's no automatic lighter, it broke when I was still a little girl when it was converted to propane. There's lighter in that bowl over there, she gestured to kitchen counter, where a fruit bowl full of papers, pens and scraps of junk sat, below the dialphone on the wall.

Okay. Slowly though. Claire edged around the counter, sliding past Ethan who kept the gun trained on her. She pulled the lighter out the bowl and lit her cigarette.

So now what?

I need that datakey.

I know. But it isn't here.

We need to go get it.

Okay. Let's go. It's only a twenty mile walk to the foothils from here.

Ethan sighed and pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. Claire stood by the sliding glass door, thing about the fact that Ethan was sitting xactly where her grandmother had been sitting in her vision.

What?

Nothing. It's just. What did you see last night when you ate the Peyote?

Ethan smiled. Nothing. I spit it out when you started throwing up. 

Too bad. It was informative. 

How so?

In a minute I'm going to break your jaw.

What?

In a minute I'm going to break your jaw.

How are you going to do that?

I'm not sure. I don't even want to do it. I'm going to feel bad about it for a long time, but I know it's going to happen.

Why?

Because I saw it.

Really? In your vision?

More or less.

Huh. Ethan looked around the room. I don't see anything that looks jaw breaking. He turned toward the hallway and as he brought his head back around Claire pushed her foot off the wall and dove over the table crashing square into Ethan's chest. The chair toppled backward and the gun clattered across the linoleum floor skidding into the hallway. Claire scrambled up ignoring the searing pain in her arm and picked up the gun. Ethan lay on his back, still sitting in the chair, looking dazed. He was gasping for breath.

Claire stood over him, gun pointed down.

Well, I guess Peyote isn't a time machine.

You. Knocked the. Wind out. Of me.

Sorry. Now get up.

He rolled over and stood up. 

Turn around and face the wall. He turned and stood against the railing that divided the kitchen from the living room. Claire walked around into the living room. Stick your hands through the railing. Stay.

She walked back around, circling the table to stay way from him. She rummaged in the junk drawer and pulled out a roll of duct tape. She came back around and proceeded to duct tape his hand together.

How am I going to get out of here?

Claire set the gun on top of the organ and went over to her bag. She tightened down the straps and threw the backpack over her shoulder. 

I'm not really sure Ethan and, as you might suspect, I don't really give a shit. If I were you I'd start with your teeth. She came around the wall and stood behind him. Now you need to kick off your shoes. 

What?

You shoes. I don't know how long it's going to take you to get out of there and I don't want you running after me. He kicked off his shoews. She leaned up against his back and put her arms around him. One me thing my dear. She unbuckled his belt and unzipped his pants.

What the fuck Claire?

She yanked down his pants and his underwear. Take them off. 

Jesus. He kicks off his panks with Claire's help. 

Well, it sure was interesting meeting you Ethan. She was out the back door before he could reply. She tossed the shoes and his pants on the roof and walked toward the back fence. She opened the gate, peering down the alley way. There was no one around, in fact it was eerily quiet. She put the safety on the gun, tucked it into her waistband and ran down the alley.

She kept running through the network of alleys until they ran out and she found herself nearing Tucson Boulevard. Suddenly there were people, people all over the street huddled around old cars. Claire walked toward the nearest crowd. The broadcaster said, again we don't know much at this point, only that something has happened in the western UAS. What is it? Claire asked the man still sitting in the car. 

Don't know, something happened, all the networks are down. So far they aren't saying anything other than what you just heard. Something to do with that sonic boom I imagine. 

Claire left the people and started walking south. Five blocks later she found an empty street and walked down it trying car doors as she went. Two streets later she found what she was looking for, an old hand crank Electrovox. She released the emergency brake and pushed it forward. She opened the truck, lifted up the cover and started cranking the flywheel. A man came out of the house across the street and she was about to run when he asked, car won't start? No. Need help? That'd be great. They took turns cranking the flywheel. After a few minutes Claire jumped in the front and pushed the ignition wires together. The car lurched, coughed and died. She did it twice more before the engine finally turned over.

The man smiled at her. Strange day huh? Half of I2 is gone.

Really? 

Oh yeah, just gray squares where my whole neighborhood used to be, can't get anything delivered in. Strange day.

Yeah. Well, thanks for the help.

No problem. He smiled and slammed the door shut. 

Claire was headed down Speedway toward the freeway when she saw a military convoy pulling off the exit to the left of her. Claire floored it and slipped under the freeway grabbing the frontage road on the other side. She skimmed the freeway for ten minutes, running red lights the whole way. Once she was well on the east side town Claire finally got on interstate 10.